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purple (a poem by Afrose Fatima Ahmed)

For the delight of guests at the Literary Voices fundraising dinner this past May, the UW Libraries organizers asked Ms. Ahmed to bring her manual typewriter, small pieces of colored paper, and her creative wits. She sat at a table with a sign: heart-crafted poems. I walked up to her, and she asked me to give her a prompt so she could hand-craft a poem for me.

Since royal purpleis the color of both the University of Washington and Northwestern University, that was my prompt:

purple
this liquid amethyst
less ungainly
than eggplant
fought with more
candor than lavender
can muster
the hue of
a sunset
occurring only once
in a blue moon
the petals
of the bleeding heart
exposed
to the open air
afrose fatima ahmed
seattle, wa
5/3/17
www.afrosefatimaahmed.com